Summer reading: A novel approach, perhaps

Ah, summer, that time of the year when the Really Big Pile of Books Beside the Bed finally gets sorted out. Which means I'll probably start with The Novel My Friends Insist I'll Love, which is An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears.

Or maybe the Book I'm Ostensibly Checking Out To See If The Kids Will Like It, But Which I Actually Want To Read Myself, which is G. P. Taylor's Shadowmancer.

Mind you, then there's the Novel I Started And Was Really Enjoying But For Some Reason I Can't Remember Never Got Finished, which would be the brilliant Steve Martin's The Pleasure Of My Company. Or its non-fiction equivalent, Walter Yetnikoff's Howling At The Moon.

On another hand, I could read the Really Big Important Non-Fiction Book That Will Improve My Mind. Anne Applebaum's Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag: A History is the go here, because there's nothing like reading about frozen genocide while you're lying on the beach.

However, I am writing a television series called Outrageous Fortune, which some journalists have dubbed "the Kiwi Sopranos" although it's not, but maybe I should read the anthology of Sopranos scripts I got from Amazon, just to make sure.

However, I want to take my mind off work, so possibly an intelligent thriller such as Matt Ruff's Set This House In Order or something fluffy and chic like The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger.

But it's summer and what will inevitably happen is what happens every summer, when I set out to read something like Judith bloody Binney's Redemption Songs and end up reading whatever crap novel it was Dan Brown put out before The Da Vinci Code.

Or I could listen to my iPod and give literature a rest for a while — just because it's summer.

* James Griffin is a canvas columnist